REPORT #487 May 2002
STATISTICAL METHODS AND WHAT KINDS WOULD WORK IN A
SMALL COUNTRY LIKE BELIZE?

Produced by the Belize
Development Trust

Prime Minister, Musa goes on about the
impoverished. As Val Shal our Mayan Indian from the
remote foothills of the south
points out, the people in the remote Toledo District
have less, but feel
wealthier than their richer poor poverty class cousins
in Belize City, the political power plantation center.

Industrialized countries have more or less, accepted
a fixed percentage of poverty and unemployment for
numerous obvious reasons. There is not much you can do
with a physical living blob with no arms and legs due
to birth defects, or severe retardation for example.

Unemployment statistics for both the USA and Canada
are mostly as my memory serves me, set at an acceptable
level of 7%. If the unemployment rate of these two
countries goes below that, then that signals an
overheated economy, rising inventories and
overproduction that will eventually self correct with a
down turn. Unemployment rates going above that number
indicate a correcting economy and possibly some sort of
wrongful effects from political policy decisions.

But what should the unemployment baseline acceptable
figure be in Belize? I'm personally not even sure that
there should be such a figure. We are not an
industrialized country and 92% of salaried jobs are
government jobs. How meaningful can a statistic that
relates to the number of government employees be? On
the other hand, most people have family businesses,
part or full time. Labor fluctuates within the family
and they do not earn salaries, but take money to live
from any earnings, which are not always profit.
Sometimes those monies come from capital that should be
reinvested in stock. If one calculated in
depreciation, ALL family businesses in the country of
Belize would be considered bankrupt. Yet ignoring
depreciation, they continue to feed families seasonally
and send children to school. Most often they do not
pay social security, or exist in data banks. Probably
a figure on numbers of business licenses would be more
accurate than an unemployment figure in trying to
calculate things in third world small countries like
Belize, which are primarily agricultural based.

When the government adopts and uses statistical
methods from industrialized countries, this should be
kept in mind. As townie academics, the bureaucrats
often have
neither the experience or brains to figure simple
things like this out, and simply adopt foreign
temperate zone methodologies of
statistical reporting that do not present any real
picture of the country of tropical Belize.

Of course, with a government that still is using 18th
century methods of accounting in the financial
department, as evidenced by the lack of ability to make
annual and monthly reports expressed in recent
newspaper articles in Belize City, the idea that any
meaningful statistics are coming out of our government
is somewhat ludicrous. The very worst run government
ministry in Belize is the
Finance Ministry. Why the Minister hasn't lost his job
is solely due
to the corruptive exploitive aspect of parliamentary
British style, party politics.